


...so are pomegranate molasses, oobleck, and engine oil (dawn on your ancestral lands)

by handschuhmaus



Series: blood is thicker than water [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cosinga can go to hell, Family angst as in angst over what it means to be family, Gen, Id Fic, Rey Palpatine, Sidious isn't the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Palpatine, also Rey Skywalker, also Rey kinda remains a nobody ALTHOUGH, but also abusive familial relationships, fix-it for the whole grandmother issue, i.e. Palpatine being genial arguably manipulative and actually having a point, look Palpatine family angst is part of my brand, not necessarily canon compliant, ok to podfic, refounding the Jedi Order with an ear to curated Darth Bane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22189489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: on [badly] chosen families, connections, manipulation, and the refounding of the Jedi Order by the granddaughter of a Sith with the echoes of Bane, curated, in her earsRey Skywalker gets a visit from her ghost grandfather. It goes, strangely, relatively well.
Relationships: Sheev Palpatine & Rey
Series: blood is thicker than water [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1628515
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	...so are pomegranate molasses, oobleck, and engine oil (dawn on your ancestral lands)

Rey has just acknowledged her chosen surname, her chosen family, again (it's still novel), when she feels a disturbance in the Force, localized behind her. 

"Yes," she says, choosing to be calm in this situation "I chose to be a Skywalker"

"Oh, wouldn't we all, given the opportunity," says the ghost of the grandfather she doesn't want, sarcastically.

"You're not telling me--" she leans into the teasing supposition that she doesn't really believe, "you wanted to marry my--Ky--Ben's grandfather."

"Certainly not. And I had as much of him as was possible for a good many years."

"Wait, did you tell Luke about that?"

"Foolish child, I believe it was obvious. That Vader would remain with me so long clearly indicated the attachment you Jedi--most of you, anyway--scorn."

"Okay, so you cheated on Darth Vader with my grandmother?" Rey says, cheery and calm. "Yeah, I know, you weren't married, but you were steady."

He gives her a funny look. "Firstly, it was not that kind of relationship, and secondly, I have no idea who your grandmother was."

"Excuse me--I know human reproduction doesn't work like that. You can't seriously tell me we know you were his father and don't know who his mother was." It doesn't actually matter to her, but she kind of hopes that teasing the ghost will encourage him to go away.

"I don't know any details about his biological parents, though I would infer they were not from a gas planet settlement." He sounds irritated.

"His. 'biological parents'? Wait, are you saying you're _not_ my grandfather?"

"No, I am, though I like the title no better than you do our name. Which is a sentiment I can understand, actually." He peers intently at her, as if to discover some commonality.

"You're telling me you aren't actually mad about me refusing to acknowledge the name," Rey assesses skeptically.

"When not grappling with mental blocks and a bit of senility, it's a clear and present notion that I kept my name to irritate someone I hated, as much as for convenience."

"Fine, I'll bite. Who were the 'Palpatines' feuding with?"

"Oh," he says with a dark delight "they had no need to go outside the family to hate someone. The local legend had it that Lord Palpatine guarded the gates to hell; I tell you Cosinga deserved a thousand hells, but then there is no ultimate justice."

"Who's Cosinga? I didn't think that was my father's name."

"He, at least the one I refer to, was my sire, and I highly doubt it was." His face quirked. "Of course, in your eyes I probably deserve a million. A trillion. Some number there is no common Basic word for." 

"Okay, smartass," Rey retorts, tongue in cheek, "for one thing _I'm_ justice, but also--I don't know, one hell is probably enough." He met her stare. "And did you just imply you also don't know my father's name? What the hell, dude?"

"Well, Cosinga certainly wasn't my son's name, and I strongly suggested he find parents that weren't from Naboo, which is where the name Cosinga actually has a per mille popularity, as opposed to billionths or less on two other worlds I know of."

Rey repeats a strange, strange part of that diatribe, despite how ungrammatical it sounds in isolation, "'He find parents'. Are you trying to tell me I was _adopted_ into the Palpatine family?" 

" _Now_ you acknowledge it. And yes. Why wouldn't he? He was."

"But that means--that means I am a 'nobody'!" She repeats the pejorative without being the least bit unsettled by it, but looks askance at him, trying to figure if he's having her on.

"So was I."

"You just suggested your father was a lord." Rey retorts.

"On a backwater midrim democracy with a few dozen thousand of them."*

She purses her lips at that. "Alright, but I'm probably not nobility and I'm adopted."

He says, simply, "You have the Force."

So she turns it on him: "Yes, I'm a Jedi, like my family before me."

"Are you going to rule the galaxy?" the erstwhile Emperor asks, as if he were inquiring about how much sweetener to put in her caf.

"--No." She says it definitively. 

"Good," he smiles a predator's smile. "Jedi are most annoying when they do that."

"What about when they're your granddaughter?" she asks, playing up the convoluted family connection, as uncertain as it is, at the moment.

"Then I get to influence them. After all, isn't this the founding of an era, an epoch?"

"You're a Sith who just told me I was adopted."

"You're telling me you have unresolved difficulties with being chosen to be accepted into a family?"

"No, I'm telling you that I don't see why you were so insistent about me when we don't even share blood."

"Well, there was exchange of bodily fluids, just not in ways typically associated with conception," Palpatine, ignoring the question of his interest, put his ghostly hand out and Rey sees a thin scar on it, below the ring and pinkie fingers. "Your father insisted as a thirteen year old that we have a blood bond. Also that I taste his wintergreen soda, so two fluids."

"But you're saying I have a relationship with anyone whose half-finished drink I took as a scavenger visiting the canteen?" Rey wonders if this stretch of the claim to extremes will disgust him.

"Philosophically and technically yes, though approximately as insignificant as a single rock here and the moon."

"This planet hasn't got any moons," Rey informs him gleefully, at a convenient place to interrupt.

"I never said I put so much stock in the ritual. I shouldn't like to have to convince myself that the absence of medical equipment confers upon blood transfusions a near-permanent binding power."

"Yeah, no, it wouldn't. But if I understand you, I'm your adopted son's adopted--and abandoned--child, and you still want me."

"Yes--" and the inflection he gives the word reminds her bizarrely of Luke! "that's very much the point, isn't it?"

"Again, _Granddad_ , I am a Jedi." She's tells herself it's less according him the title (but he said it annoyed him) and more the sort of mockery Han Solo apparently once did.

"We already addressed that, and it isn't an obstacle, though I shall make my displeasure known if you start going around killing people for religious reasons."

"--Is 'trying to kill an innocent' a religious reason in your book?" Rey wants to know what she's up against.

"I don't know what you mean." He peers intently at her.

"I mean, if I try to defend the innocent from someone trying to kill them, are you going to claim that's a religious reason? Which is absurd, but so is becoming a Sith."

"Oh, that. I meant religious reasons such as using the Force differently than you. I..." he sounds and looks hesitant "find I'm a bit more temperate in death, actually. And should you be doing that favor to children in care of an authority figure, I should probably feel rather the opposite."

"'Temperate.' Does that mean you regret becoming a Sith now and would renounce it?"

"Hmmmph. Have you heard me renounce anything?"

"Cosinga," she blurts, very quickly.

"But since then, no, you haven't. No, I am still a Sith."

"Then why are you hanging around a Jedi?"

Instead of answering, he cites some quotation, in a very teacherly voice "'Through power, chains are broken.'"

Rey resorts to over-literal physics. "I suppose you can put it that way. Seems helpful-er" (she uses this purely to irritate him) "to talk about abrasive or shear forces, usually."

"Metaphorically as well," he says, with a small conspiratory smile.

"Okay, okay, yes, that's why we learn to use it. I don't know what philosopher you're quoting here, but yeah, for the sake of argument, it is the Jedi duty to break chains."

"'Through power, victory is gained'," he cites, an amused tilt to his ghostly head.

"Victory is overrated," Rey retorts. "Maybe if it's against oppressive overlords," she hopes he takes the hint, "but Jedi don't fight for the sake of glory and victory. We don't worship at that altar."

"Do you fight to annihilate the enemy, like a current of positrons?" his expression, as he asks this fanciful question, clearly says _you're not the only one who can reference physics!_

And Rey, not realizing the historical significance of the utterance, says "Don't be silly. For one thing that's very un-Jedi--" (it has never been so, before) "--and for another, you're not some proper antimatter version of me. You're me that uses evil weapons, me that rejects morals, me if I thought power was more important than freedom,"

"True," Palpatine says, scathingly but only faintly so. "--'from a certain perspective'."

"What part of it do you contest?"

He looks closely at her--his eyes look strangely sad, almost rueful, for a Sith--and says formally, lightly, like it's a game he's saying she's won, or something he's teaching she's got very, very right, "I'm not you." 

Which Rey had said mostly to irritate him, but the sense of his words themselves make her more insistent on the idea she just synthesized and said. She changes tactics, for the moment. "I won't let more Sith arise."

"How will you stop them?" he asks pointedly.

And, her motivation mostly to annoy him, she answers back "I'll adopt them, early," and grins fiercely and cheekily at him.

He mirrors the smile, but his is easy and almost ...satisfied. "You'll find adoption is give and take. Good teachers learn from their students, is the well attested idea."

"They'll be Jedi," she threatens.

"How much do ...assigned names really matter, _Skywalker?_ " He pauses, and then quotes, as if a compliment, "'Through passion I gain strength.'"

The mention of passion makes Rey realize he's probably been quoting some anti-Jedi thing at her, given "There is no passion, there is serenity." But she finds it doesn't matter much to her, except perhaps to examine the motives of any other source of such lines much as she's doing him. The thing is, it's right, more or less, in some sense. To live is to struggle, to strive. It's also, in Jedi notions, a harmony with the rest of the universe, but that doesn't change the essential truth. Not growing, not cultivating, isn't living. It's merely surviving, the thing she always wanted to stop doing.

"You're really not upset that I suggested you were sleeping with Anakin Skywalker?" Rey prods, changing the topic.

"As if I haven't heard it before," he allows with magnanimity. "'The Force shall set _us_ free.'"

She wonders where that comes from, and also, if she dismisses him, whether he'll return to annoy her, but she chooses a Jedi greeting-and-farewell, expressly to annoy him. "May the Force be with you, _grandpa_ " Only...she finds she means it. If it could give her some strange and convoluted family ties to this man, and convince Anakin Skywalker to turn against him on the strength of his son, maybe he'll find in himself the potential for some peace that doesn't warrant hell.

Palpatine answers her, with a strange and solemn sincerity despite the formulaic words "And with you... _granddaughter_ " before winking out of view.

Rey turns back to the form she was filling out, only to be slightly surprised by how much time they'd spent in discussion.

**fin**

*she looks it up later, and, indeed, in the last days of pre-Imperial times, an internal statistics bulletin noted that some 35,862 ± 230 individuals on Naboo held that title. In trying to find this at all, she meets a doctoral history student who cheerfully informs her that, in terms of gross political ambition, the Palpatines in general were "an outlier that shouldn't affect her view of the average titled citizen as a whole". When Rey asks about the power the queen did hold, she's informed that the hitherto almost ceremonial title acquired real local power almost entirely due to a political game founded by Palpatine's--well, her great-great-grandfather (the post-Imperial Naboo are, oddly, less eager to hide all other members of the family, and a search for "Palpatine family" turns up a letter to the editor written by Cosinga himself, expressing disdain for adoptive children, so... She's not giving in to the Emperor saying it.). And by a Solon Nabarrie. Perhaps the entwining of Skywalker with Palpatine has been going on for generations now.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized partway through writing this that it's influenced by limeta's Hermione+sane-ish Voldemort dynamic, especially in "Retired Prometheus", but also some aspects of the writing in that one in general...
> 
> oh and...
> 
>   * pomegranate molasses is a sweet sour cooking ingredient made primarily from pomegranate juice (and used mostly in or near the Middle East). Pomegranates are linked mythologically with the Persephone story; the pomegranate seeds she eats while in Hades' domain each oblige her to remain a certain period of time with him...
>   * oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid: if you don't apply considerable force it will flow, but subject to slaps or other force, it behaves like more of a solid...
>   * engine oil is, of course, a lubricant, probably still useful in the GFFA for some part of most things one might pilot, like ships or speeders...
> 



End file.
